Gesellschaft für Comicforschung

CFP: The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship

The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship is an open access, open peer review academic journal dedicated to comics scholarship. The journal aims to make original contributions to the field of comics studies and to advance the appreciation of graphic narrative.

We aim to promote comics scholarship within academia and the general public with contributions that present specialised knowledge in an accessible language. As a publishing platform we encourage digital research, public engagement and collaboration.

Focus and Scope

This journal’s purpose is to make original, media-specific contributions to the field of comics scholarship and to advance the appreciation of comic art.

Our research is inspired by, but not limited to, the following questions:

How are form and format interconnected in comics?

What is the meaning of “content”?

How are page sizes related to what is contained in them?

How do different technologies affect the processes of creating and reading a comics page?

How do different panel arrangements work?

What is the media-specificity of a comics page?

What are some of the different possible ways of reading comics pages?

In addition, we welcome articles that explore the ways in which comics, narrative drawing, and other graphic means of communication can be used for scholarly purposes, including

comics as scholarship (like Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening),

practice-based research (like Simon Grennan’s Dispossession),

research-based narratives (such as “graphic medicine”)

and forms of network or data-visualisation (like Nicolas Labarre’s diagram of a research project).

Publication Frequency

The journal publishes on a continual basis, with new articles coming online as soon as they have passed peer review and been copyedited and typeset. There are no formal submission deadlines for regular issues.